Kulturkampf

[killamajig]

I learned a new word today: Tenderqueer

https://www.them.us/story/tenderqueer-meaning-origins-definition-online-debate-social-media

Where does the term “tenderqueer” come from?

Like many slang words, the actual creator of “tenderqueer” is unknown but it’s largely understood to have begun to be used on Tumblr in the early 2010s. As early as 2012, a group of Tumblr users were labeling themselves tenderqueers in an underground movement that centered softness both aesthetically and as a philosophy. Vulnerability is foregrounded in this iteration. In this way, it is often thought to be adjacent to or synonymous with the archetype of the “Steven Universe gay” or “Steven Universe queer.”

“For me it’s kind of just meant queers who see their own oppressions or perceived oppression as more important than any other oppression,” author and journalist P.E. Moskowitz tells Them, referencing a popular meme in which queerness is used as a bandage to cover up white guilt. “It’s people who think they can not care about anything else except their own perceived oppression — especially white people, I think.”

One of the most popular definitions of “tenderqueer” on UrbanDictionary describes it as a queer person “who uses identity politics to avoid accountability.” Another definition describes it as a queer person “who is perceived as too sensitive.” As Moskowitz puts it, tenderqueers believe their “emotional truth is the same as a material truth.” In all of these contexts, the word is used derisively, leading some to object to its use altogether — more on that later — but it’s important to note that they aren’t the only ways the term has been used.